Of all the many different things people can do in order to try and lose some weight, one of the simplest and most effective is nothing more than changing the way you hydrate your body. A huge percentage of overweight people tend to drink soda, sports drinks, juice, tea, coffee or alcoholic drinks but very few of them drink any plain water. This is so simple it defies belief that the obvious is so often missed, but switching to water can brink so many benefits while doing away with so many of the problems.

Why We Don't Drink Water

It is often said that the simple answer to any problem is usually the best one. When the problem is obesity or being overweight, then by looking at what the person habitually drinks, the solution stands out like a sore thumb. Water is pure, contains zero calories, zero additives, zero sugar and zero taste.

That last point is probably the main reason most overweight people tend to ignore it as a way to quench their thirsts. Why we are so hung up on everything we eat or drink having to taste of anything is also a major contributing factor in the current crisis facing developed countries with regards to their populations' health and weight.

Human taste and its merits has been so exploited by a food and drinks industry that we all feel we have to have a certain flavor associated with everything that passes our lips. This is why water, the plain stuff that comes out of our taps and in certain cases where that source is of dubious quality, bottles, is so often shunned on favor of more interestingly flavored soft drinks and sodas, or juices and other carbonated or still artificially or otherwise flavored beverages.

How Water Helps with Weight Loss

However, when we realize the problems that are caused by drinking so much of the wrong things and make a conscious decision to switch to drinking mainly plain water, a lot of good things start to happen. From a health viewpoint, the body gets a regular free detox because water helps the digestive process to be more efficient in the way it processes the food we eat.

This means more of the nutrients are extracted from the food, while more of the waste products are efficiently excreted, leaving far fewer impurities and toxins in the final stages of the digestive tract, this being the intestines large and small and the colon.

From a weight loss perspective, we can now see how that would benefit us greatly. A more efficient extraction from our food means less will be stored as fat, which is the major contributor to being overweight and obese.

A better detoxified system also means a cleaner system and one that is less liable to be impacted by disease, unwanted bacteria and other problematical residues that a clogged system has to deal with. But there is more that water does for us that also helps the process for not only losing weight, but maintaining a healthy body weight once we have reached our target weight.

Water As a Diet Aid

Plain water, when drunk just before a meal, not only primes the stomach and digestive tract in preparation for the food it will next be processing, but it also helps to make us feel fuller, sooner when eating. This is invaluable to help prevent overeating, another cause of weight gain, because our stomachs register they are full and are able to send the signals of being full to the brain much sooner, so we are less prone to continue eating after we are full.

It also helps to make a smaller meal (which we ought to get used to eating if we are to effectively lose weight) satisfy our hunger better so we don't feel the need to bulk it up later with high calorie snacks.

Lastly, drinking plain water has many health giving properties in that it helps purify the blood, aids digestion and reduces instances of indigestion and other digestive problems, makes the skin more supple and young looking, relieves tiredness and helps to boost metabolism. As one of the great weight loss tips, from both a health and body weight maintenance perspective, drinking water is so good for us, we really should work on taking this up as our preferred means of quenching our thirst.